In a draft book chapter I am working on with co-author Kseniya Kudischeva, we discuss the increased importance of factual assessments in public law. Here is the first of four substantive parts. Comments and thoughts welcome. Common law judges have traditionally been highly reluctant to interfere with factual assessments made by administrative decision-makers. This reluctance […] Read more

The remarkable decision in Acadian Society of New Brunswick v Canada (Prime Minister), 2022 NBQB 55 deserves comment, especially for its treatment of justiciability and remedy. Here, DeWare CJ declared that the appointment of a unilingual Anglophone Lieutenant-Governor for the bilingual province of New Brunswick was unconstitutional as it violated a variety of New-Brunswick-specific provisions […] Read more

The application of the principles of restitution/unjust enrichment to overpayments of tax in Canada is in a muddled state. The problem arises where a taxpayer overpays on the basis of a mistake of law or a mistake of fact, a capacious set of categories which can include mistakes about the lawfulness or applicability of a […] Read more

In my post on “Unreasonable Bilingual Interpretations of Law“, I mentioned that the Supreme Court would have the opportunity in Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Mason, 2021 FCA 156 (leave granted) to say more about the methodology of reviewing administrative interpretations of law. Mason raises other issues as well, one of which also arose in […] Read more

In its decision in MZAPC v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2021] HCA 17, the High Court of Australia ventured once again into the murky territory of materiality in administrative law (a topic I address in detail in this paper). The issue in this case was who bears the onus of establishing materiality, the […] Read more

In “One Year of Vavilov“, I observed that “some portions of Vavilov are liable to become battlegrounds between different factions of judges, those who favour more intrusive review on questions of law in one camp, their more deferential colleagues in the other” (at p. 15). One of those portions is the one on judicial review […] Read more

Here is the final video from this year’s Administrative Law & Governance Colloquium, featuring Dr. Jennifer Cobbe on “Reviewable Automated Decision-making”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXZVYyRa-4 Thanks to the hundreds of participants this year, and to my partners, the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, the Centre on Governance and the Centre for Public Law. Read more

My week got off to an early start last Monday, as I joined the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong for a discussion of Understanding Administrative Law in the Common Law World at 6am Ottawa time. Dr Cora Chan and Professor Jason Varuhas offered incisive comments (and I did […] Read more